234 



DISCOVERY 



tacist risings which took place in January and March 

 1919. That a stable Government and social system, 

 based upon the normally accepted principles of Euro- 

 pean civilisation, were produced was due, chiefly, to 

 four things. Firstly, the general will of the German 

 people obviously was in favour of such a Government 

 and social system. Secondly, the army leaders, headed 

 by the potent personality of Hindenburg, who was a 

 kind of living legendary hero, accepted the Revolution, 

 and the soldiers followed their leaders. Thirdly, the 

 civil service, a large, efficient machine, consisting, 

 except in the highest posts, of educated bourgeois 

 people, went on functioning, while the Provisional 

 Government made no attempt to displace or " purge " 

 it. Finally, that the Revolution was more like a 

 peaceful transition, a normal development, was largely 

 due to the group of resolute, moderate men who made 

 themselves into a Provisional Government and from 

 the first moment controlled the movement. The 

 natural bulwarks of society should have been the 

 National Liberals, educated, experienced, liberally 

 minded middle-class men, such as saved France from 

 the Communards after the fall of the Second French 

 Empire in 1870 . But the National Liberals, the natural 

 leaders of the democracy, had lost their birthright 

 when they accepted the brilliant autocracyof Bismarck's 

 military empire. Failing the National Liberals, Ger- 

 man society was saved by the Social Democratic 

 Party, and chiefly by Ebert, the former saddler, 

 who took over the Chancellorship from the hands of 

 Prince Max of Baden on that fateful ninth of November. 



[Note. — The chief documents concerning the German 

 Revolution were translated and published in America by 

 The Living Age on March i, 1919. They were reprinted by 

 the American Association for International Conciliation in 

 April 1919. It is from these documents that the quotations 

 made in^the above article were taken.] 



[Readers are also referred to an admirably lucid description 

 of "The German Federal Economic Council," and the ideas 

 and events that led up to it, to be found in Representative Govern- 

 ment and a Parliament of Industry, by Herman Finer (Fabian 

 Society — George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1923, 75. 6i. ). — Ed.] 



An Alphabet of Gods 



By Lewis Spence 



Author of " The Gods of Mexico," " The Cwilisalion of Ancient 

 Mexico," etc. 



It is a somewhat depressing commentary on our 

 knowledge of the wonderful civilisation of the Maya 

 Indians of Yucatan and Guatemala that, although we 

 are aware of the names of many of their principal 

 gods, we are still unable to identify the sculptured or 

 painted representations of them carved on the walls 

 of ruined temples, or depicted in the three exquisite 



manuscripts which are all that remain to us of Maya 

 literature. This is largely due to the difficuUies which 

 have been encountered in deciphering the hieroglyphs 

 which undoubtedly contain the names of these 

 divinities. The personalities of the Maya pantheon 

 are, of course, sufficiently familiar to us, their insignia 

 and general significance hold few remaining secrets. 

 But the names and titles of the Maya gods as handed 

 down by tradition and the \\Titings of the early Spanish 

 missionaries we cannot apply to the carvings or pictures 

 of divine beings with any degree of confidence, and until 

 such time as the native system of writing is finally re- 

 vealed to us, we have adopted the expedient of labelling 

 the portraits of the gods with the letters of the alphabet 

 from A to P. 



The first student of Maya antiquities to apply this 

 provisional and truly scientific system of nomen- 

 clature was Dr. Paul Schellhas, who so long ago as 

 1897 introduced it to the notice of Americanists as 

 " a purelv inductive natural science method," essen- 

 tially amounting to " that which in ordinary life we 

 call ' memory of persons.' " By an intensive examina- 

 tion of the pictures of gods in the manuscripts he 

 learnt gradually to recognise them promptly by the 

 characteristic impression they made as a whole. He 

 was assisted in this not only by dissimilarities in face 

 and figure, but by such details as the constant 

 occurrence in the case of each god of some outstanding 

 hieroglyph, ornament, or other symbol. He dealt 

 with the figures in the manuscripts alone, and avoided 

 all hypotheses and deductions. The present writer, 

 following in his path, has, however, not refrained 

 from application to those other sources of information 

 which he ignored, and by degrees has been enabled 

 to arrive at a rather fuller comprehension of that 

 extensive Maya godhead to whose worship the gorgeous 

 temples of tropical America were erected. 



Schellhas candidly admitted his lack of knowledge 

 of the places of origin of the three invaluable manu- 

 scripts which preserve for us those graceful and delicate 

 representations of a forgotten OlvTnpus. But Dr. H. J. 

 Spinden, of the American Museum of Natural History, 

 in his monumental book on Maya Art, has, by a careful 

 comparison of the art- forms of those wonderful abori- 

 ginal paintings, dissipated nearly all existing doubts 

 on the question. The Codex Dresden he assigns to the 

 region south of U.xmal in Yucatan. In the Codex 

 Peresianus he finds marked similarities to the art of 

 the ruined cities of Naranho, Quirigua, and Piedras 

 Negras in Pet en, a district immediately to the south 

 of the Yucatan peninsula. As for the Codex Tro- 

 Cortesianus, he believes it to have been the work of 

 a painter living in the northern district of Yucatan. 

 It is, of course, manifest that all of these must be 

 copies of much older manuscripts, and Spinden is of 



